Shop and sell: Half Price Books

OK, guys, I have a confession to make. I am oooooold school when it comes to my media. I like physical paper books, and CDs. It's part habit and mostly sentimentality.

I like the smell of the paper.

I like listening to an album as a whole, and thumbing through the lyrics, photos, art, and poetry of liner notes.

I like folding down the corners of my pages when I take a break from reading. And I want to be on my own timeline. (Both of which make me a bad candidate for using the library.)

I like browsing through rows of books and discs, and thumbing through things until one catches my eye, and I read a little, and decide it's spoken to me that I should bring it home.

If you are a digital media consumer or library user, kudos to you for already reducing your footprint. If you are an old soul like me, enter: Half Price Books. Half Price Books is a used book store with over 120 locations in the US.

Any used book store is a great way to participate in reduce, reuse, and recycling. These stores take overstock from regular book stores as well as buying back books or taking donations from members of the community.

A few additional things that I love about HPB:

• They are participants in their communities. They donated 1 million books last year to non-profits, schools, jails, community centers, libraries, and more. 
• They have an environmental mission, from their base mission of re-using books, to their employees' yearly participation in Earth Day, to responsible sourcing for their stores, to hosting an additional website of green tips: http://www.becomegreen.info/
• Educators can receive an additional 10% off their purchases. 
• They commit to people by having responsible supply train transparency and profit-sharing with their employees. 
• Some of the stores have special events like author readings and children's story time. 

If you haven't gone to a Half Price Books before, it's pretty easy. The front looks pretty much like any other bookstore. They have new/overstock items up front, and then rows and rows of bookshelves, movies, and music. Usually in the back is their sell counter. You bring in whatever you'd like to move on from your home, wait about 10 minutes, and then they make you an offer on the items. To set expectations, it's usually pennies on the dollar, because they need to make their cut and they'll be selling the items half off. But I'll bring in a bag of items, and leave with $5-10 dollars to either buy MORE BOOKS!! or a cup of coffee. :)